The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings

by Lars Brownworth

  That it did not also become the capital of a Viking kingdom, was because Viking society was as tribal as the Irish. One of the chief traits of the Viking’s was their adaptability, both in battle and in the areas they settled. They would generally try to build on the existing political order, modeling their realm on whatever had come before. In England they had found a tradition of strong centralized government, but Alfred and his son and grandson had been too strong to allow a Viking kingdom to take root. In Ireland, they faced the opposite problem. There were only embryonic communities and petty kings, so Dublin became another petty player on the eternally shifting ground of Irish politics.

  But if England was too strong, and Ireland was too chaotic to found a lasting state, France proved just right. The Carolingian Empire provided the Vikings with fertile ground, where the centralized but decaying monarchy provided both a template for a strong state and the inability to contest it. All that was needed was a sea-king who was willing to settle abroad.

  Chapter 10

  Rollo the Walker

  “He has need of his wits who wanders wide.”

  - Edda of Sæmund the Wise

  Very little is known about the ancestry of the man who would eventually found one of the most powerful states in western Europe. He was most likely of Norwegian extraction, and is known to posterity as ‘Rollo’, the Latinized version of the name Hrolf or possibly Hrolleif.82 The most comprehensive account of his life comes from a later Norman historian named Dudo of St. Quentin, who had been commissioned for that purpose by Rollo’s grandson, Richard I. According to Dudo, young Rollo was the son of a trusted companion of Harald Fairhair, the first king of Norway. Despite their friendship, however, Rollo’s father is described as fiercely independent, a man who “never lowered the nape of his neck before any king.”

  Perhaps he should have. In the last years of his life Harald Fairhair turned over the kingdom to his favorite son Erik Bloodaxe, who took a rather dimmer view of stubborn nobles. As soon as the old man died, Bloodaxe invaded and seized his farm. Rollo’s brother was hacked to death in front of him, and Rollo was forced to become an exile.

  Like other Scandinavians who had run afoul of more powerful lords, the boy became a professional Viking, spending his formative years raiding in England and the Frisian coast – what is today the Netherlands. Thanks to his prodigious size – apparently he was so large that the undersized Viking horses couldn’t bear his weight, forcing him to walk everywhere – he soon attracted a company of Danes to fight with him.83 Whatever the truth about Rollo’s parentage or size, he clearly had a knack for pillaging, and he and his company crossed the English Channel and joined a great surge of Norsemen heading for the Frankish Empire.

  The flow of raiders back into Frankish territory had started in the wake of King Alfred’s victory over the Great Heathen Army. In the summer of 885, the largest raid yet seen on the continent headed toward Paris, with seven hundred ships carrying as many as forty thousand men.84 “The rage of the Northmen” one French cleric wrote, “was let loose upon the land.” Unlike the horde that had besieged England, however, there was no single accepted leader of this Viking army. When the Parisians attempted to parley by sending out a Viking who had settled there, he couldn’t find anyone with the authority to speak for the group. When he asked who they were and what there intentions were, their reply – according to Dudo – was that they were Danes and had come to conquer France. When the messenger asked who their king was, they drew themselves up proudly and said, ‘We have no king, for we are all equal.’

  This exchange may be fiction, invented by a Norman writer trying to emphasize his own Duke’s independence from the French crown, but it captures nicely the independent streak of the ninth century Vikings. They put great stock in freedom of speech and action – not as concepts, but as stubborn facts. Most of them had no king because they were outlaws of some form or another, looking to carve out a name and some wealth for themselves. They were inspired by plunder, not patriotism or feudal obligations, and were only loosely held together by clan or family ties.

  If there was one man who was respected more than others it was Sigfred, a Viking who had probably served with the Great Heathen Army. A year after Alfred and Guthrum had come to terms, he had crossed the North Sea with a large army and sacked several cities of the Frisian coast. For several years they had their way with the eastern Frankish kingdom, raiding Maestrict, Cologne, Aix, and Trier until the Frankish emperor, Charles the Fat, decided to rid himself of the troublesome raiders by buying them off.

  Sigfred was happy to oblige, and spent the next three years raiding Picardy and Flanders. In the spring of 885, he returned to Charles’ domains and asked for a hefty bribe. When Charles refused, Sigfred led his fleet into the Seine estuary, brushed aside a Frankish army, and sacked Rouen. It was here that he was joined by the bulk of war bands, and by November the entire army had reached Paris.

  In the ninth century, there were only two bridges connecting the Île-de-France with the Seine river-banks. The northern one was narrow, but made of stone and strongly fortified with large, garrisoning towers at either end. The southern bridge was also protected by towers, but was a flimsier structure made of wood.

  Everything depended on these two bridges. If the Vikings could destroy them, they would not only cut off Paris, but have access to the rich country beyond. If, on the other hand, the Parisians held the bridges, the Vikings would be cut off and exposed to a relieving army.

  Sigfred first tried to negotiate his way past them. There were only two hundred armed men inside Paris, and he promised to leave the city unmolested if they would agree to pull down both edifices. The Parisians refused, saying that their emperor had charged them with protecting the bridges, and they would do so to the last man. The next day the siege began.

  Sigfred threw everything against the tower on the north bank of the Seine protecting the stone bridge, hoping to catch the Parisians by surprise. But after fighting for an entire day and suffering heavy casualties from the boiling pitch and oil poured down on them, they had manages to accomplish nothing and the Vikings withdrew. The second day they tried again, only to find that during the night the defenders had added another story onto the top of the tower, further increasing their advantage. The Vikings tried to counter by bringing up a battering ram and heavy catapult, but were again driven off with horrendous casualties.

  By the end of the second day of fighting, the Vikings realized that they needed either new tactics, or better siege equipment. They constructed a palisade and spent the next few weeks collecting supplies, and planning their strike.

  On the last day of January, 886, they attacked the bridge itself in a furious, sustained assault. The protecting moat was filled up by throwing everything they could think of into it – including branches and dead animals. When that still wasn’t enough, they slaughtered their prisoners and tossed the corpses in as well.

  This gave them access to the protecting tower of the bridge, but when they tried to set fire to it they were driven back with heavy losses. In a final effort, they filled three longships with straw and oil and set fire to them, pushing them so they crashed into the tower and bridge. But the flames licked harmlessly at the stone pilings, and the ships burned themselves out without doing any serious damage.

  The failure – coming as it did with such loss of life – was a blow to Viking morale, but nature provided a boost a few days later when a winter flood did their work for them and washed away the southern bridge. The tower guarding it was now stranded, and fell easy prey to an attack. The Vikings were then free to plunder upstream, so they left a small force to continue the siege and raided all the way up to the Loire.

  The Parisians sent frantic messages begging Charles the Fat to come to their assistance. The emperor was in Italy, so he sent his general Henry of Saxony with an army. He must have stressed the importance of speed, because Henry pushed his army hard. The difficult winter march across the Alps was followed by an exha
usting attack on the Viking camp, which failed miserably. After that solitary attempt, Henry withdrew, abandoning Paris to its fate.

  The only bright spot for the Parisians that dark winter, was that Sigfred gave up. His attempt to emulate Ragnar Lothbrok’s famous siege had turned into a farce. Surely his time could be spent more fruitfully than sitting under some huge stone walls and waiting for his prey to spontaneously give up. He concluded that the siege was a fool’s errand, and allowed himself to be bought off with the rather pathetic sum of sixty pounds of silver – a far cry from Lothbrok’s six thousand.

  Sigfred’s departure did not mean the end of the siege, however. He was only one commander among many, and he was unable to convince many of his fellow Vikings to depart.85 The siege dragged on until October when the Parisians were heartened by the news that Charles the Fat was on his way with the imperial army. This knowledge gave them the courage to fend off one last full-scale assault by the Vikings who had heard the same news and were anxious to take the city while they still could.

  Those Vikings still around when Charles arrived were easily routed. Paris was garrisoned with royal troops, and Charles advanced on the Viking camp. The emperor had the Vikings surrounded and could have struck a decisive blow, but to the shock of the Parisians – and probably the Vikings as well, he opened negotiations instead.

  Charles was hardly a successful warrior, and he had a rebellious vassal in Burgundy that was proving hard to put down. Here was a chance to kill two birds with one stone. In exchange for free passage along the Seine, the Vikings would be allowed into Burgundy where they could ravage to their heart’s content, punishing Charles’ rebellious vassal. Then, as an incentive to leave Frankish lands, they were to be given seven hundred pounds of silver.

  The Parisians were furious when they heard the terms. They had performed their duty of defending Frankish territory at great cost, only to have their emperor reward the Vikings with exactly what they wanted. As a protest, they refused to abide by the treaty and blocked the river, refusing to let their former enemies pass. The Vikings were forced to drag their ships overland some distance to get around the blockade.

  Charles may have thought his plan a shrewd move, but it backfired disastrously. Neither Sigfred nor the other Vikings kept their word, and were soon raiding imperial territory at will. Three years later Charles was deposed, and the Parisians elected a count named Odo, – the man who had directed the city’s defense during the Viking siege – as their new king.

  Rollo and his war band spent their time raiding in Burgundy, where they were able to accrue substantial loot. Surprisingly, his only defeats seem to have come at the hands of the clergy. In 910 he was driven off from a city by a local bishop who had gathered a militia. The next year, he advanced against the northern French city of Chartres, but again a bishop foiled his plans. Rollo’s fleet had been sighted several days before, and the cleric had time to marshal his troops.

  The defenders decided not to risk a siege and marched out to confront the Vikings in the open. In the fierce battle that followed, Rollo gained the upper hand, but victory was snatched away when the bishop – who had been watching from the walls – came roaring out of the gates with a mob of citizens behind him. The boost in numbers turned the tide and by nightfall the Vikings were trapped on a hill to the north of the city.

  Fighting at night was unthinkable for most medieval armies since in the darkness it was almost impossible to tell friend from foe. The Franks sensibly withdrew to their camp, posting guards to make sure the Vikings didn’t slip away. Rollo, however, had been counting on just such a reaction. The Vikings frequently attacked after the sun went down, using the chaos to their advantage by striking in prearranged thrusts and then withdrawing as the opposing army scattered.

  He waited till the early morning, when all but the sentries were asleep, and sent a few men into the middle of the Frankish camp. At a signal, they blasted their war horns, as if an attack was under way. The camp came alive in a panic as men rushed half dressed out of their tents, milling about in confusion. In the chaos, Rollo and his men cut their way out, running for their ships.

  The Vikings reached the bank of the Loire, but were not far enough ahead of the pursuing Franks for the entire army to board their ships. Switching tactics, Rollo slaughtered every pack and stock animal he could find, erecting a wall of their corpses. When the Frankish cavalry arrived, their horses were unnerved by the smell of blood and refused to advance. Rollo had temporarily saved the Vikings, but he was still trapped. A Frankish army under the command of King Charles the Simple had arrived upstream and was blocking the escape route. Sooner or later the king’s army would move in for the kill, or the Vikings would starve. Either way there seemed little hope, but instead of attacking the exposed Norsemen, the king offered them extraordinary terms.

  King Charles had been on the throne for just over a decade. He was not, despite the English translation of his nickname, a stupid man.86 The Frankish policy of buying off Vikings had gone a long way towards bankrupting the kingdom. Roughly one third of the coins minted in France had ended up in Viking hoards, and more than a hundred and twenty thousand pounds of silver had been paid out. There was little money left to defray the tremendous cost of keeping the royal army in the field, and in any case Charles was well aware of the limitations of his authority. While he could defeat individual bands of Vikings in pitched battle, there was no hope of checking their lightning raids across the entire breadth of his kingdom. He had to defend the vital core and delegate the coastal defenses to others.

  That meant not only tolerating a Viking presence on the Seine, but actually encouraging one. If he could convince the Norsemen that it was in their best interests to defend rather than raid the coast, Charles would provide first-rate protection to his kingdom’s shoreline. There was only one guaranteed way to do this and that was to make the Vikings landowners.

  This bold tactic had already been tried by his cousin Charles the Fat some twenty years before. The Vikings had been swarming over Frisia for more than half a century, and had been the de facto rulers for nearly as long. In an attempt to stabilize the area, Charles the Fat had contacted one of the Viking leaders named Godfred, offering to give him most of Frisia in exchange for his conversion to Christianity.87 Godfred had accepted and been duly baptized, but Thor was not so easily washed away. Instead of consolidating his holdings into a unified state, Godfred left to go pillage Saxony. When Charles the Fat reminded him of his duties, the Viking demanded to be given some wine-districts along the Rhine as a condition of peace. Clearly the experiment in Viking protection had failed, so Charles the Fat had had Godfred assassinated.

  It is to Charles the Simple’s credit that he realized that the plan to establish a Viking buffer backfired not because it was impossible for the Norsemen to settle down and become loyal citizens, but because Godfred had been the wrong man for the job. In Rollo, however, he had unwittingly found the perfect candidate.

  The Viking had probably first gone to sea as a young teenager, and after a life spent raiding, was now in his mid to late fifties. Judging from the number of men who followed him he was already wealthy, and had reached the age where a man thinks about enjoying the fruits of his labor. Here was a chance to settle down and reward his followers with that most precious commodity – land.

  The two sides met on the highroad from Rouen to Paris and signed the treaty of St. Clair-sur-Epte. The terms were much as they had been for Godfred. In exchange for becoming a Christian, Rollo was to be granted the lands of the Seine basin from Rouen to Évreux, to be held in fief from the king. He pledged to keep peace with the Christian king, defend the lands he had been given, and provide military assistance when required.88

  Rollo was baptized with his entire army, which proved somewhat embarrassing for all involved. When his men realized that they would get a fresh white tunic after the ceremony, several of them were caught being baptized multiple times. Despite scandalized whispers, an incident was avo
ided. The same could not be said for the ceremony of homage, however. According to a dubious later Norman source, Rollo balked at the traditional kissing of the king’s foot. No Viking warlord was ever going to grovel in public, so he delegated it to one of his men. The hulking Norseman yanked up Charles’ foot to his mouth, upending the surprised Frankish monarch.89

  Regardless of the difficulties in getting through its ceremonies, St. Clair-sur-Epte was one of the most important agreements in medieval history. The treaty created the Terra Normanorum, the ‘land of the Northmen’ which today is better known as Normandy. From the beginning, Rollo took his duties seriously. He rebuilt the abbeys and churches that the Vikings had plundered, built up the defenses of Norman towns, and put together a legal code to protect his citizen’s lives and property. Most important of all, he divided up the land among his most important followers, transforming a mobile Viking aristocracy into a landed class.

  Rollo also seems to have remained loyal to Charles the Simple. When a revolt deposed the king in 923, Rollo dutifully led his army against the rebel. Neither Rollo nor his immediate successors stoped harboring Vikings – the Normans would continue to offer them sanctuary until the eleventh century – but Charles the Simple’s experiment was a success. After Rollo, there were no further major attacks on the Seine, and Normandy itself began to adopt French customs.